Tuesday, November 27, 2007

With “Peace on Earth” a perennial holiday theme, here are two “Mars, the Roman god of war” pieces worth reading, even though neither is science fiction.

The first is “Digging into the myths of Rome,” a recent BBC article detailing the discovery of a cave in Rome that may be the site where, according to Roman mythology, a she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, the city's founders and twin sons of Mars.

The second is The Boston Globe’s "Season’s readings,” a list of recent books that includes former poet laureate Marvin Bell’s Mars Being Red (2007), which is a collection of poems that wages a "war of words on the ravages of battle."

"I'm an optimist. I discard all such dark tomorrows. I have faith in man as God and God as man; I believe we'll be immortal, seed the stars and live forever in the flesh of our children. That's my job as a writer -- to show man his basic goodness, to dramatize his struggle up and away from this planet." -- RB